About us

The World Wide Fund for nature (WWF) is one of the most significant and largest independent international environmental organizations, uniting millions of loyal supporters and operating in more than 100 countries around the world, including the Russian Federation.

WWF mission — preventing the increasing degradation of the natural environment of the planet and achieving harmony between humans and nature. The main goal is to preserve the biological diversity of the Earth.

More than half of our budget is made up of donations from individuals, whom we call WWF supporters. There are more and more WWF supporters in world every year, and we invite everyone to join this good and truly important cause - to help preserve nature.

Since 1994, in the Russian Far East, the World Wide Fund for nature (WWF) has launched its first projects dedicated to the conservation of the Amur tiger population. In the future, with the help of caring supporters around the world, projects for the conservation of other rare species of fauna began - the Far Eastern leopard, the Oriental stork, the Mongolian dzeren, Red-crowned crane, etc. Within the framework of these projects, many protected areas were created, expanded and maintained, the practices of sustanable forest management and conservation of freshwater ecosystems of the Amur Basin was promoted.

Over 28 years of work in Russia, the Fund has successfully implemented more than 1,000 field projects to preserve and enhance the natural resources of Russia in 47 regions of the country and this work continues.

The increasing environmental threats associated with the economic development of territories required a transboundary approach in the ecoregion. Because building dams and barriers at borders, draining wetlands to expand farmland in one country inevitably affected the ecological integrity of the ecosystem and the survival of species in neighboring countries.

WWF has included the Amur-Heilong ecoregion among the 30 priority ecoregions of the world requiring biodiversity conservation, along with the Amazon, Congo and Yangtze.

By 2002, with the financial and technical support of WWF of the Netherlands, Germany and the USA, together with the leading public organizations of Russia, an Action Plan for nature conservation was developed for the Russian part of the Amur ecoregion.

After the release of the scientific brochure Amur-Heilong River Basin Reader, all disparate projects were combined into a 10-year strategic program - a plan for cross-border cooperation on conservation.

By 2006, three WWF offices were already working under this program - the Amur branch of WWF Russia, the WWF Northeast China and the WWF Mongolia (Dadal, eastern Mongolia).

Yuri Darman, former director of the Amur Branch, Honored Ecologist of Russia, who headed the foundation's branch in 2001-2016, made a great contribution to the activities of the WWF Russian office in general and the Amur branch in particular. He managed to coordinate and unite the disparate actions of leading scientists and experts aimed at preserving biodiversity in the Amur ecoregion, as well as expand the area of protected natural territories by 7.4 million hectares.

Amur Branch team at work

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Amur-Heilong Ecoregional Complex covers more than 2.1 million sq.km – the entire basin of the Amur river and basins of the rivers directly falling to the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, from the Tumannaya river to the Uda river. It is the largest river basin in Northeast Asia. The Amur flows east from the Mongolian plateao through 13 regions of Mongolia, China and Russia and captures a small piece of North Korea in the upper reaches of the Sungari River. The Amur River is one of the remaining free-flowing major rivers in the world, with a length of approximately 4.444 kilometers, and its watershed exceeds 2 million square kilometers. The river forms the border between China and Russia by the extent of more than 3,000 km, which makes it one of the longest border rivers in the world.

The basin is rich in biodiversity and contains thousands of plant and animal species and many types of ecosystems. Biological richness is explained by a wide variety of natural areas. Unfortunately, existing national environmental protection programs and international environmental agreements and efforts are insufficient to prevent environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity in the Amur ecoregion.

The Amur River basin is a transboundary territory and needs international environmental responsibility. The types and forms of land use, cultural traditions and the rate of economic development are drastically different in Russia, Mongolia and China, but sustainable development requires cooperation in environmental protection and natural resource management.

The Amur information center is a specialized web portal for granting all interested parties with free access to geographical data (such as, interactive Web maps, WMS-, WFS-, ArcGIS- map-tools, GIS-services metadata search and integration with ArcGIS-online), reference information, expert opinions, reports, multimedia archives and other data on the Amur-Heilong ecoregional complex. Amur Info Center got developed for the implementation of the Conservation Action Plan for the Russian Far East Ecoregion Complex, to combine the relevant efforts of the government institutions, public organizations, business sector, scientific institutes, etc..
In 2010, the first version of the web portal was created, but time does not stand still and new challenges required development and adaptation to new technologies, in 2016, a second version of the site appeared, which exists to this day, developing, changing and replenishing new data and ways of presenting them on the World "web" every year.

Our website is created within the international cooperation and has 4 language versions: Russian, English, Chinese and Mongolian. The Russian version is supported by specialists of the Amur branch WWF in Vladivostok, the Chinese version – office of Northeast China WWF in Changchun, Mongolian – office of WWF Mongolia in Dadal, and the English version – is is updated jointly. All participating offices use and develop AmurInfoCentre as the platform for exchange of information and promotion of the Amur-Heilong Ecoregion.

Members of our team are dedicated to their work and are proud that their work is part of the overall work of the global family aimed at achieving harmony of humans and nature.